Gear

Optics: 7x50 binoculars, 35mm camera

Objects

Comet Hale-Bopp

Report

Bonus night! The cold front that had been rushing towards
us during the day seemed to have stalled out, so I headed
out to the observing site and was rewarded with over an
hour of clear dark skies at the comet. There were some
clouds low on the western horizon, and occasional flashes
of lightning to the southwest, presumably just ahead of
the front (and also presumably containing snow showers
instead of rain showers).

There was a fairly strong south wind early, so I was
hiding my barndoor tracker behind my car. The temperature
was in the low 40s, and the sky didn't seem quite as
transparent as it can be with a naked-eye limiting
magnitude near Polaris of about +6.6. I shot some more
photos and I now have photos for 4 straight nights, and
5 out of the last 6!

With the naked-eye, the tails didn't seem quite as long
they were last night, probably due to the slightly less
transparent skies. I estimated about 14 degrees for
the plasma tail and about 12 degrees for the dust tail.
In 7x50s, the bright streamer and dark lane in the plasma
tail I had seen last night were not noticable, and in fact,
there wasn't much detail visible anywhere in the plasma tail.
Hopefully the photos will reveal more about how the tail
structure has been changing night-to-night (and confirm
the things I've been seeing!).